New PDF release: Buddhism: One Teacher, Many Traditions

Discover the typical flooring underlying the varied expressions of the Buddha's teachings with of Tibetan Buddhism's bestselling authors.
Buddhism is practiced through 1000s of thousands of individuals world wide, from Tibetan caves to Tokyo temples to redwood retreats. To an outdoor viewer, it would be challenging to determine what all of them have in universal. In Buddhism, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and American Buddhist nun Thubten Chodron map out with readability the convergences and the divergences among the 2 significant traces of Buddhism—the Mahayana traditions of important and East Asia and the Theravada traditions of South and Southeast Asia. particularly deep attention is given to the foundational Indian traditions and their respective remedy of such principal tenets because the 4 noble truths the perform of meditation the that means of nirvana enlightenment. The authors search concord and bigger figuring out between Buddhist traditions all over the world, illuminating the wealthy advantages of respectful...

The Diamond Sutra, composed in India within the fourth century CE, is without doubt one of the so much precious works of Buddhist literature and is the oldest current published publication on the planet. it truly is referred to as the Diamond Sutra simply because its teachings are stated to be like diamonds that lower away all dualistic idea, liberating one from the attachment to things and bringing one to the additional shore of enlightenment.

Long ago eu students have tended to regard either Madhyamaka and Yog? c? ra as separate and essentially hostile traits in Mah? y? na Buddhist proposal. Drawing seriously on early textual facts this paintings questions the validity of any such "Mah? y? na faculties" speculation. by means of down-playing the past due commentorial traditions, the writer makes an attempt a basic reappraisal of the epistemological and ontological writings of Nagarjuna, Asanga and Vasubandhu.

Extra resources for Buddhism: One Teacher, Many Traditions

Sample text

There is also bricklaying for the Dharma, cooking and cleaning for the Dharma, painting ceilings for the Dharma: a productive expenditure of energy through which we grow, and grow rapidly. For work of this sort, the more of us there are, the wider the context we need. That wider context is the sangha, or spiritual community, in the widest sense; that is, the sangha as consisting not just of those who are technically and officially monks, but of all those who are treading the Path of the Buddha.

Personal relationships are, as we know, much more intense – much more `loaded' – than non-personal ones, and hence this particular syndrome is much more dangerous than the last. The person from whom we expect the experience is, of course, the great guru. We ourselves have to do nothing. All we have to do, miserable wretches that we are, is to believe in him, believe that he can give us the experience. Naturally, the experience can't be given by just an ordinary man, not even by an ordinary, run-of-the-mill guru.

There wasn't any one Christian doctrine any more, and as the number of conflicting and competing versions of the `one true faith' proliferated, doctrine became much more rigid. Myth and legend and all the more colourful elements – in the Protestant countries especially – gradually disappeared, while ritual dwindled to a ghost of its former splendid self. In some areas, ritual was banished altogether. The fine arts became more and more secularized. The church was separated from the state. Religion was divorced from secular life and became more and more a matter of private morality and personal feeling.